Redmaus wrote: your 5 dollar burger will be 10 dollars. That isn't an exact quote but more of an example.
If wages from the bottom through middle go up by some steep amount, and restaurant meal prices go up by the same percentage, the only people negatively affected are those at the top. Everyone else gets a big boost to their standard of living because everything else (rent, healthcare, clothing, transportation, ...) becomes relatively cheaper for them.
The years after 1968 had been riddled with rising interest rates, rising commodity prices, and new technology.
More realistically, the mid-1960s were a high mark (the Great Society, the civil rights movement, a strong liberal Supreme Court, the hippie movement, etc.) as far as the social safety net, civil rights, labor rights, social equality and cohesion, women’s rights (at a legal level, if perhaps not yet in practice), and broad-based prosperity flowing from general sharing of the tremendous economic growth of the 30s–60s.
1968 was a critical year though. The Vietnam war was going into full swing. There were mass movements around the world. Big worker/student protests in Paris. The Tlatelolco massacre during student protests in Mexico. In the US, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and there was a very contentious Democratic party primary. Then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And so on.
In the US, the Democratic party completely imploded. Kennedy’s assassination threw everyone into confusion. Despite Eugene McCarthy being massively more popular, the Democratic convention chose VP Hubert Humphrey as the nominee, and the Chicogo police brutally clubbed and tear-gassed protestors outside the venue.
The Democrats lost the general election to Nixon (I think the final tally was like 1% off in popular vote, but the electoral vote was a landslide). Nixon’s primary strategy was to appeal to whites who were pro-war and anti-black, and who disapproved of Johnson’s support for civil rights. It was a working strategy, causing a permanent party realignment, where racist southern whites switched from the Democratic to Republican parties. (At the state level, this party realignment took another 20 years in some places, but for presidential elections it was pretty fast.)
In broad strokes, Nixon, and later Reagan and both Bushes, as well as local Republican party officials around the country, prioritized breaking down voting rights, breaking up organized labor, sending spies into the civil rights movement to undermine it from inside, lowering taxes on the wealthy, fighting a “drug war” as a way to destroy minority communities, deregulating industries and privatizing national infrastructure, cutting down public education, fighting anti-discrimination laws, and so on. Basically tearing up the fabric of civil society, preying on people’s fear and hatred, and working to divide people. Not to mention foreign policy, which centered on overthrowing democratic governments and propping up authoritarian dictators, in the name of anti-communism (or more recently in the name of some vague “regional interests”), but mostly at the behest of multinational corporations.
The Democrats or at least a significant proportion of them, on the other side, have mostly been wishy-washy at best, and sometimes just as bought out by corporate (recently, especially financial) interests. Bill Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the shredding of federal welfare programs, a host of bullshit “tough on crime” laws, nasty anti-immigrant policies, continuing erosion of labor rights, corporate-but-not-person-friendly free trade agreements, and so on, in the name of “bipartisanship” and “responsibility”. Both Clinton and Obama have had great difficulty passing any substantive legislation through intransigent obstructionist Republicans in Congress.
Pretty much the only US president in the past 70 years who wasn’t a war criminal, and who stood on any kind of personal principles, was Jimmy Carter, and he only made it in on a fluke in the backlash against Nixon’s blatant criminality.
The US Supreme Court has moved steadily and now very far to the right. Pretty much every replacement of a Justice from the 1970s–2000s was for a more conservative one. Well established constitutional and statutory interpretations in favor of labor rights, consumer rights, voting rights, civil rights, debtors rights, etc. have been reversed, giving stronger advantages to the wealthy and powerful in every aspect of American society.
Labor productivity has gone up steadily from (to pick an arbitrary cutoff) the 1930s to today, but while those improvements were broadly distributed through the society up through the 1960s, in the time since, and especially since the 1980s, productivity keeps going up but middle-class wages are stagnant or slightly declining, while the share of income going to the top 1% has rocketed off the charts.
Figuring out how to unwind an oligarchic, aristocratic society fronted by a half-broken quasi-democracy, and return the society to some kind of equality is not an easy job. Maybe not possible, I don’t know. The way to start is to tax capital gains as income, push estate taxes back up to historical levels, add new top marginal income tax levels aimed at folks making >$1e6/year, and work to close tax loopholes. Then to spend massively on fixing up our infrastructure so it doesn’t all collapse, increase the minimum wage (spaced over a few years if you like), continue fighting for a single payer healthcare system, figure out how to get college to not force massive debt onto people too young to competently make such big financial decisions, work on unrolling the broken racist criminal justice and prison system, etc.
The sad thing is, having a broken society, with decrepit broken infrastructure, poor education, a broken healthcare system where people are left untreated or relying on emergency room care, a massive debt load, abandoned and underfunded civic institutions, governments at every level coopted by self-interested thugs, rampant cheating throughout business and society, etc., is not good for anyone. Even rich people don’t really want to live in a third world country.
This leaves Bernie as the lesser of evils for me, by far. He might have some extreme positions on foreign policy and gun control, but his funding and voting record are pretty sound.
